Dance Psychology

by Peter Lovatt

Dance Psychology is the study of dance and dancers from a scientific, psychological perspective. Written by Dr Peter Lovatt (AKA Dr Dance), this Dance Psychology textbook provides a general introduction to the Psychology of Dance and then it delves in to eleven of the most central questions concerning Dance Psychology. Are humans born to dance? Does the way you move your body change the way you think? Will dancing make people happier? Can dancing put people in to a trance-like state? Will a person's dance confidence change across the lifespan? Does dancing make people healthier? Why do we enjoy watching some dance performances more than others? How do dancers remember so many dance routines? Why don’t dancers get dizzy? Will dancing improve a person's self-esteem? How do we communicate emotions with our body? Drawing on academic literature, this book is engaging, technical and, in places, critical; it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Dance Psychology.

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 9, 2018

About the author

DR. PETER LOVATT BSc, MSc, PhD is a Dance Psychologist who heads the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire. After working as a professional dancer in musical theatre, and overcoming a severe reading difficulty, he took degrees in Psychology & English, Neural Computation, and Experimental Cognitive Psychology. He is the author of an academic book on dance psychology titled Dance Psychology.

Reviews

[Autumn Lytle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a lot of interesting content and connections between dance and helping cognition and your mental state overall. A pretty good book, but I do have to say, the editing is atrocious. There are so many parts in the book that are just missing punctuation or spelling is wrong. Nothing is wrong with Dr. Lovatt’s writing, but he needs better editors.

[Leslie Zehr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Heavy in research and detail.

[Abigail Samson · Rating 3 out of 5]

So far, I find the information to be a little shallow. In the chapter Dance, Mood, and Depression, Lovatt mentions a few studies that showed that dance sessions improved participants' mood. That information was gathered through self reported mood before and after the sessions. He also states in this chapter that exercise is well documented to improve depression. But these are not very scientifically rich to me. Why does exercise and dance improve mood? What is the neuroscience? What is happening in the body? I'm looking for evidence into why dance is beneficial so that people can recognize it's value, not just some studies that report- ah, people say they feel better after dancing.

[Jérôme Jaglale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Does a nice job at presenting some studies and pointing out their flaws. It's a fascinating glimpse into this world, with its terminology and methods.

However, that makes it clear there's so much more work to be done before we have more interesting and reliable takeaways, so it's disappointing in that regard.

If you find yourself unwilling to finish this book, I'd recommend reading at least the last chapter, "From dancer to dance psychologist", about the author. And may be also checking him out dancing a "happy dance" on his website https://www.peterlovatt.com :)

[Marckian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely scientific.

Mainly describes scientific dance experiments to show bennefits we already know(mostly), like self esteem and mood improvements.

The chapter about trance and dance which could be one of the most interesting topics is very short and fails to deliver.

The parkinsons experiments were nice, thank you for that.

Maybe if it was written in a less scientific approach it could be more interesting, BUT the info is really not that exciting to begin with.

Peter might have been too afraid to explore some of the questions with a free thinking explorative approach, and instead uses a rigidly, scientific way of describing questions and answers. Someone might like this, but not me.